All deaths are untimely, and it is surprising that
the ridiculous adjective-noun collocation never made
it into Myles Na Gopaleen’s Catechism of
Cliché, or even Flaubert’s Dictionary
of Received Ideas. Who ever died ‘in’
or indeed, ‘on’ time? But the passing
of self-described ‘Punk Rock Warlord’
Joe Strummer in 2002, at the hardly excessively ancient
age of 50, just when he and his band The Mescaleros
were beginning to attract the kind of positive recognition
that had eluded him in his wilderness years since
the demise of The Clash, was not only unexpected,
but also seemed somehow cruel. On the other hand,
it could certainly be argued that the reputation of
someone with such a fine body of work behind him,
from his punk rock heyday, was already secure, and
he didn’t need to do anything else to prove
his worth. He even managed, in one of life’s
more forgiving twists of fate, a reconciliation with
former band mate Mick Jones just ten days before his
sudden death from an undetected congenital heart condition,
when Jones joined Strummer on stage during the final
Mescaleros tour, at a benefit gig for London’s
striking firemen, for a rendition of The Clash’s
first single, 1977’s ‘White Riot’.
It was the first time in twenty years that the two
halves of one of the greatest songwriting teams in
the history of British popular music had played together,
and as is pointed out in veteran film maker Julien
Temple’s new documentary, Joe Strummer:
The Future is Unwritten, it was wholly appropriate
that this reunion of sorts was for the firemen, and
not for two million quid. It is the most pivotal and
moving moment in an altogether excellent movie.

When I meet Temple he is in affable mood, willing
to talk about his career lows as well as highs, wryly
discussing days gone by as well as promoting his current
project. Curiously though, at the same time, this former
punk – who previously tried to do a film about
The Clash in 1976 before jumping ship to The Sex Pistols
– can also partake of the reserve one associates
with certain English public school boys. It’s
a weird mix of quiet self-confidence and noticeable
self-effacement. Something he shares with his subject,
another product of the same system?

“I had a funny thing with Joe: that I was born
in the same year and we shared a lot of contradictions,
time and experiences. There was the whole mid-1960s
thing in London, which I was really turned on by. Then
the hippy thing which followed, and going to Glastonbury
in 1971. Then came the squatting, back in London again,
and after that the start of the whole punk movement
itself. A lot of moves Joe made in his life I actually
made as well. So there is this sense of autobiography
in the film, which made it easier for me.”

Indeed, one of the more interesting notions reiterated
by this movie (and by last year’s Temple-directed
documentary on the history of the Glastonbury Festival)
is how the ’90s were the decade when hippies and
punks finally realised they had more in common with
each other than with any other segment of society, which
seems a far cry from the quasi-Stalinist ‘year
zero’ approached initially espoused by The Clash,
at the behest of Svengali-style manager Bernie Rhodes,
even if it had been effectively jettisoned by the time
third album London Calling appeared, with its many multi-cultural
nods and appropriations from the past.

“I was always arguing that The Kinks should
be absolved from this guillotine job, because I felt
that they were a punk band in ’65, so I would
argue for a connection.”

Would it be fair to see him as someone as much influence
by music as by film?

“Well, I was always very into visual things,
but I did start to see the world through a window of
music in the mid-’60s, because it did seem that
they were singing about your lives. They probably weren’t
that much older than me, but they seemed like legends.
I used to bunk off school and watch The Kinks drink
at The Flask in Highgate. I went to school in Hampstead
Heath – I first went to school in Marylebone,
where I would look out the window and see The Rolling
Stones being dragged into court during the lessons.
I was lucky because I had some friends who had older
brothers, so I was snook into The Marquee to see The
Kinks under someone’s great coat.”

Whatever about their similarities, Temple acknowledges
the differences that existed between Strummer and him
as well: “He hadn’t gone through the Roxy
Music move that I had, and a lot of people had, and
smartened up.”

“He went the r’n’b route?”
“Well, yeah, he really lived that squat thing.
I mean, I enjoyed it, it was great thing to do, get
away from your parents, live in a mad household with
mad people doing whatever they wanted, but I think Joe
was really living it as a way of life, whereas I did
it because it was cheaper than paying rent. I was going
to film school at the same time. I never was a real
hippie. Joe did it for real. I was a fake. I mean I
did it, and I loved it, but I wasn’t going to
drop out. I was interested in getting an education in
a conventional, boring way, I suppose. I did like learning
about things, so I liked going to university.”

They became close friends and neighbours for the last
five years of Strummer’s life, when the latter
relocated to Somerset with his second wife Lucinda,
a school friend of Temple’s film producer wife,
Amanda. What was it like meeting him again, having been
out of touch for twenty years, and having a bit of ‘history’?

“Well, there was this thing in the early days
of punk, like, ‘it takes one to know one’:
who’s this other middle-class guy in a room full
of immaculate punks, do we really need this guy around?
I saw him in Glastonbury in 1971. What’s he doing
here?”

“You felt threatened by each other?”

“There was an element of that. But when I got
to know him better I was just surprised at the depths
of the guy, how passionately he’d speak about
things the old Joe Strummer would never have spoken
about. He was much more at ease with his own background,
as a diplomat’s son, and at ease with the hippie
thing.”

“Maybe moving around so much when he was a kid
was what sparked his interest in so many types of world
music?”

“Yes, and it was great to see him getting his
self-confidence back again, after the years of fall-out
from the end of The Clash – to see him put The
Mescaleros together, and then to see them getting really
good. He was always a great person to be around, at
least when I got to know him. Maybe I missed twenty
years of a great person to be around, I don’t
know.”

The central image of the film is the campfire, since
for the last ten years of Joe’s life the idea
of a campfire – any loose assembly of people bonded
by rising flames and advancing dawn – became an
art form in itself, the essential outdoor forum for
constantly evolving ideas and conversations.

“Just as in his lifetime, we had people from
all walks of life sitting by the fire, listening to
the music that was so much a part of him. It was a place
to lose themselves in the flames; in the firelight everyone
is equal, the famous people no more relevant then the
not so famous people. By interviewing that way for the
film we were freeing ourselves from the ‘talking
heads’ of a conventional documentary. We were
getting a real sense of friendship and connections.”
However, some would appear to be more equal than others,
for Bono appears by himself, saying his piece at his
own personal fire on Killiney beach.

Still, the fact that Temple opts not to give contributors
name credits, although initially confusing, ultimately
works, as does his signature use of footage from old
movies, like Animal Farm, 1984 and
If. Temple has made both features and documentaries,
so does he favour one mode over the other?

“I don’t really think of them as different.
I mean, they call me the uber-rockumentarian, which
is a word to hang yourself by, and I just hate that
genre. I don’t think of myself as a documentary
film maker. I just think of them as films, telling stories.
Having said that, I like the way you’re left on
your own with a thing like this, there aren’t
loads of bankers sitting on your shoulder. You’re
working with less budget, you don’t have a script,
so they don’t know what you’re supposed
to do, so they can’t bust you for not getting
the shot by 9.30.

“At the same time, I hope I’ll be able to
do some fictional films with a similar freedom now.”

“You’ve got more clout?”

“Well, I’ve got more clout than I did
as Julien ‘Absolute Beginners’
Temple,” he laughs, putting the critical and commercial
mauling he got for his 1986 musical in perspective.
But he has suffered at the hands of the British film
industry, for deviating from its realist norm, like
one of his influences, Michael Powell.

“I was very amazed to find Michael Powell’s
films when I did because I’d been taught that
the English cinema was a very literary cinema with no
visual flair, and when I saw those films I was blown
away by how beautifully imagined and cinematic they
were.”

Jean Vigo, about whom Temple made a film while in
college, as well as 1998’s Vigo –
Passion for Life, was another touchstone.

“I really related to all the films I saw by
Vigo, as a guy who did it outside the rules, outside
the system, who did it with his friends, he found the
money under mattresses, he took the camera off the tripod
for the first time. He did a lot of very personal things
in this industry which is very regimented, with army-style
roles.”

This obviously contributed to Temple’s punk
connection, with its ethos of “taking on the machine,
not dropping out to Wales like the hippies had done.”

And what of his infamous involvement in The Sex Pistols
saga? Was 2000’s band-focused film The Filth
and the Fury a putting to rights of bad feelings
engendered by 1979’s Malcolm McLaren collaboration,
The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle?

“I felt that I owed them (The Pistols) a film.
Not that I was atoning for any sins. What we created
with Rock’n’Roll Swindle was a
polemical provocation, designed like a red rag to a
bull, to annoy and anger Sex Pistols fans. That was
the point. It was a joke, it was a dark, surreal, Godardian
joke, like F For Fake, which had come out around
that time, where you take the truth and make it unbelievable
and you take the fiction and make it create more fiction
that you make people buy. It was a joke on people who
had Sex Pistols posters in their bedrooms, because by
that time there shouldn’t have been any bedroom,
never mind posters. But I had got tired of hearing Malcolm
moaning about how ‘I squeezed them out of clay’,
especially as he would have been terrified to be in
the same room as them.

“But there are hundreds of ways to tell that
story. John Savage has told it, so has Greil Marcus.
I did it two ways – two halves of the same story.”

Right now he intends to further muddy the borders
between biopic and rock doc, in a film about the heroes
of his adolescence, The Kinks. He will have actors playing
Ray and Dave Davies, because, “You’ve got
to show them young, when they were growing up, how Cain
and Abel emerged.”

For the moment, his Strummer film, coupled with Chris
Salewicz’s recent biography Redemption Song,
should guarantee that attention continues to be focussed
on the man who many people would still consider –
despite the very un-punk-like longevity of his band
in comparison with The Pistols – the personification
of the spirit of the movement.